Missouri Rolls Red Carpet For Stewart

MAUI, HAWAII — Wearing a colorful Hawaiian shirt and a smile as big as his home state's Gateway Arch, Missouri basketball coach Norm Stewart recently shuffled into the press room of the Lahaina Civic Center.

His Tigers had just soundly defeated No. 7 North Carolina - on the heels of impressive victories over Evansville and No. 12 Louisville - to win the championship of the Maui Classic.

Stewart, looking tanned and relaxed and very much at peace with himself, sat down and said, ''What a great way to come back, huh?''

After a season of illness, emotional turmoil and NCAA investigations, Stewart is back, trying to uphold a career that has placed him among college basketball's coaching legends. And his fifth-ranked Tigers seem to be a team that can help him forget quite easily.

For the Tigers, the 1988-89 season can most kindly be described as chaotic. There was Stewart's well-chronicled illness, in which he underwent surgery to remove part of a cancerous colon. There was his strange behavior afterward, when he went into a nine-month seclusion, yielding no clues, not even to his closest friends, about his future.

There was the scandal involving assistant coach Bob Sundvold, who drew the attention of NCAA investigators for allegedly paying a player, an investigation that is still going on.

And then there was the period of Missouri's season when assistant coach Rich Daly ran the show in Stewart's absence, and frequently seemed to get as much respect from his players - most of whom he had personally recruited - as a substitute teacher in a junior high school.

Under normal circumstances, such a man might want to consider retirement. For Stewart, who at age 54 already has more than 500 victories, it seemed to make even more sense. But the thought never entered his mind.

''Coaching basketball is what I do, what I love to do,'' said Stewart. ''Lying in that hospital bed . . . I never even contemplated another phase of life but what I had been doing.''